Guy Ruddock (UK) - Data Centers: How Do You Order Yours?

Today, data center procurement is evolving and facing new challenges – not only with design but with the high cost of power, operational investment, capital and debt constraints. Companies are looking for new ways to address growing IT capacity needs that will help them transform their business and reduce their upfront costs to allow them to see quicker returns. Data center flexibility and design is at the heart of these discussions.

Having been in the industry for the best part of 30 years, a good proportion of which was spent in the position of CIO, I’ve seen and personally experienced just how lengthy, tedious and costly the entire data center procurement process is - with build and design taking, in some instances, well over two years to complete.

Traditionally, land acquisition for the data center space took at least three months, shell construction six, the waiting list for Mechanical and Engineering (M&E) equipment up to a year and the final fit out at least another six months. That’s a total of 25 months just to get your data center up and running.

CIOs are forced to take a guess at what their IT needs will be two years down the line and years beyond that for longevity of their data center investment. This long term forecasting means that by the time your data center is complete, the business needs could have changed. With the abundance of technological advances such as the consumerization of IT and the sheer volume of data traffic and storage, people are looking for more flexibility in their data centers to cope with increasing IT capacity and shorter delivery times.

CIOs need to shorten the entire data center procurement cycle from two years down to months. Today there is a wider choice in the market and it can be as simple as choosing your design configuration, location and making sure you have the connectivity to networks and power. I’d almost go so far as to say, it’s as easy as shopping online.

One such company that has recognised the changing procurement cycle for data centers and the need to source more energy efficient, lower priced power is Verne Global. Verne needed to acquire additional IT space very quickly due to a busy pipeline of customers. It chose a modular approach due to the quick turnaround on deployment and the flexibility for it to deliver additional capacity on demand, as and when a customer needs it. Not only this but it is creating a data center campus that provides dual sourced renewable energy to its customers – from Iceland’s year round geothermal and hydroelectric energy resources. In conjunction with our modular design, Verne Global has opened the world's first dual-sourced 100% renewably powered data center which will be ready in less than four months.

This is a prime example of how companies are finding more innovative ways of coming to market more quickly to meet customer capacity and IT needs for today and for the future.